From the foreword of the book "There Are People Here: A Diary" by Evdokiya Sheremeteva.
“I wrote the book in the winter of 2015-2016. It is difficult to define the genre of this book. On the one hand, all the events are real. So are the characters. On the other hand, this is my reality. My war. My Donbass. And it is difficult to talk impartially here.
Zhenya, my friend with whom I have been travelling in Donbass (Zhenya from Moscow), commented on the book like this: ‘it exposed the flesh’. Yes, exactly like that. I have ripped off my skin and thrown myself at your feet. And I am scared.
I remember a story of a woman whose house was hit by a shell. She was standing near the foundation of her home and talked about how her chickens had burned. After the explosion, they flew up in the air and caught on fire. At that moment I caught myself thinking that I was standing there imagining those flaming birds. Autumn was upon us and gloom was hanging in the air. There were no leaves to cover the horror of what was happening, and a woman was telling me how she had lost everything. I stood there thinking that if I were making a film, it would open with these very shots of chickens burning in the air. And that is dreadful. It is horrible that I, all of those who have come with me and continue to do so, have ceased to be acutely aware of this line. The line between life and death. Between reality and the news. When I started travelling around, I lived through every such story. I was processing it. October 2017”.
The cover of the book “There Are People Here: A Diary” by Evdokiya Sheremeteva.
© Photo : Evdokiya Sheremeteva
People Here
The war broke out.
I learned about it from Lida. Not from newspapers or the Internet. My war in Lugansk and Donetsk began precisely with Mangusta's "live journal".
Stories about war touch us all. But they touch us from afar. We gnash our teeth, we worry, but somehow we live our lives. We flick the buttons on our TV remotes, close books and magazines, scroll through the web with a mouse and, eventually, exhausted we turn off the computer.
And then, Lida’s message popped up in my feed: “Tanks have rolled in”. It flashed so quickly that I did not immediately notice it among the piles of articles about Crimea and the Olympics. And my heart skipped a beat. In a second, somehow, the war "there" became the war "here".
Lida, wait, we were going to introduce our daughters this summer, were we not? You promised apricot compote and I promised fig jam.
*A photo from the book “There Are People Here: A Diary”
Summer Letters
(Writing to new friends)
‘Letters from Donbass’
9 August 2014
Diary
***
Oh! Dunya, I had a messed up weekend! There was no electricity and no water in town on Saturday... It was night. A maternity hospital without electricity is almost as bad as shelling! Not having Internet was nothing compared to the only working ancient phone in the building. Anyway, I found out that the emergency generator was in the basement and it was leaking. Emergencies Ministry workers are boorish and foul-mouthed, but great guys. Also, my nurses run faster than a doe, carrying a bag of plasma to the infirmary through a frightful park (because it is unrealistic to call for a car). Our pathologist is the greatest guy (he brought his own generator from home and a bunch of extension cords, went down with me to the basement while talking to the emergency workers, until they realised that there are two newborns connected to the machines!) When the generator that had been brought stopped working, the pathologist again rushed to the emergency vehicle, and everyone powered up the incubators, the refrigerator (they had brought plasma back because the refrigerators in the medical ward were leaking by that time) and the operating room through a window. At 11 p.m., the lights came back on! What a joy that was! And my girls went into labour... I woke up Monday morning to explosions at four in the morning. And the pregnant girls were crying about everything.
***
Hi. I'm more or less fine. The National Guard is in town. No Internet. The fibre-optical line was damaged somewhere. And there wasn't any before because those marauders looted the petrol station along with the server. And the gasoline too. The gas station operator was shot in the leg. The post lady saw a van loaded with dead bodies. No one knows who they were. They went door-to-door with lists.
***
Today, I had my mobile phone fixed and I talked to a former colleague.
She told me how she had spent the last two weeks. Here's a snapshot from July 2014 in Ukraine. For four days we sat in a bomb shelter around the clock. There was no water in the city for more than a week, then no electricity due to damaged wires.
She told us about the looting: windows and walls were broken in shops - people were looting everything they could get their hands on, and guys were carrying cognac and exchanging it for cigarettes, the latter being in short supply.
She said that during the first few days, bread was delivered from Severodonetsk and cost twelve hryvnias instead of five.
She told me that they were giving humanitarian aid somewhere and that her grandmother dragged a bag with the inscription "Russia" across the asphalt, but there was a hole in it and rice was spilling out along the road. The guys ran up: "Grandma, look, your rice is spilling out". She said: "That's all right, I've had enough, I'm already carrying the second one..."
Many houses have no windows, she herself had three windows broken, the city of Proletarsk was hit hard, and not a single house is left intact on Svoboda Street. Lots of unexploded shells, there are some that are stuck in the ground, specialists came and looked at them and said: “If we start to extract it, it will explode, we have to detonate it on the spot”. How can it be done on the spot when the city is all around?
She cooks on an electric stove, boils water with a boiler (she already has light - her neighbours, former power station workers, repaired it with their own resources). Some people go out on the street and cook over a fire in large pots. One bridge is still intact, so the supply is getting better and better.
By the way, it looks like school will start on 1 October...
***
We arrive at work. Sitting there, there is a bombardment outside the window. And it's very loud. Somewhere close by? They don't fire much in the daytime, today is an unpleasant exception. When they fire, especially mortars, I like to stay home.
***
Tonight it rained all night, apparently drowning out the sounds of gunfire. Because I only woke up twice, noted to myself that it was mortars firing, and went back to sleep. And Dima came in the morning, almost asleep, said that they had started at half past one and went on almost until morning, and in the morning gave three volleys of something new - a shot, and then a loud hiss. Who the hell knows what kind of novelty arrived at our lot.